Why Software is Our Greatest Crime-Fighting Superhero

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently released its annual report, “Crime in the United States,” which stated that in 2014 there were 1.2 million violent crimes committed in America, 63.6% of which were aggravated assaults. In addition, 8.2 million property crimes were reported by law enforcement agencies; victims suffered financial losses of approximately $14.3 billion.

However, not all larceny occurs in “the real world,” per say. In a separate FBI report on Internet crime, cybercrimes accounted for nearly 270,000 documented incidents last year. These illicit activities, which include auto and real estate fraud, government impersonation scams and extortion, resulted in total losses of $800 million.

With the sheer volume of crimes being committed on a daily basis and the severity of the resulting financial damages, clearly more could be done to deter future incidents. Unfortunately, as technology advances, criminals become more sophisticated in their methods, and it becomes even more paramount to remain multiple steps ahead.

Most traditional data management and analytic solutions are not suited to conduct crime analysis, because they cannot scale to massive data volumes, still rely primarily on batch processing, or are not capable of traversing the relationships between data points, such as connecting a perpetrator to a fraudulent bank account.

To prevent future crimes from occurring, law enforcement agencies are adopting Information Fusion software platforms to correlate fast, streaming data with their archival data so that they can identify trends and patterns from all data sets, rather than a mere and incomplete subset. Information Fusion technology better enables crime analytic applications by providing context to more quickly and efficiently locate unknown-unknowns in real time.

Objectivity has a rich history working with law enforcement agencies and the military to support crime analytic use cases at both the micro level of individual cybercrimes to the macro level of national counter-terrorism efforts. These organizations are leveraging Objectivity database platforms to deliver more accurate situational awareness and accelerate time-to-insight.

Our recently announced product, ThingSpan, extends these capabilities even further by integrating the fusion technology that Objectivity has been perfecting for decades with industry-standard open-source tools, such as HDFS and Spark. Now organizations will be able to track down criminals faster and with more precision, without the exorbitant IT costs of traditional databases, regardless of how many degrees of separation lie between suspects and other entities.

A more technologically advanced world means greater risk of serious criminal threats, but it also means that law enforcement is becoming increasingly more proactive than reactive: by preventing such threats from turning into actions, we can stop crime before it starts.